Poems

At Bay

Coral-bells purpled the fallen sycamore leaves, dead, the dead
versus those who attempted death, versus those who effectively
fashioned out of such attempts a style akin to electric guitar
shimmer swelling and unswelling like starlings when they first
lift off, or like stars when, from their fixed sway, they come
suddenly loose, any man letting at last go of a career spent
swallowing—trying to—catastrophe’s jewel-studded tail, un-
swallowable, because
holy, in the way of fanfare, its gift for
persuasion, how it can make of what’s ordinary, and therefore
flawed of course, a thing that’s holy, for a time it seemed so,
didn’t restlessness seem to be, little god of making, no less
impossible in the end than any of the gods, where’s the holiness,
they sleep never, they tire infrequently, to be tired bores them,
distraction refined by damage would be their drug of choice
hands down, if they could choose, even they don’t get to.

About This Poem

"For some reason, I have only thought of the phrase 'at bay' as meaning something like 'at a safe distance.' I was interested to learn that its chief meaning comes from hunting, that moment when an animal is forced to turn and face its attackers. Originally I wanted to call this poem 'Artillery,' after the George Herbert poem."—Carl Phillips

More by Carl Phillips

When the Famous Black Poet speaks,
I understand
that his is the same unnervingly slow
rambling method of getting from A to B
that I hated in my father,
my father who always told me
don't shuffle.
The Famous Black Poet is
speaking of the dark river in the mind
that runs thick with the heroes of color,
Jackie R., Bessie, Billie, Mr. Paige, anyone
who knew how to sing or when to run.
I think of my grandmother, said
to have dropped dead from the evil eye,
of my lesbian aunt who saw cancer and
a generally difficult future headed her way
in the still water
of her brother's commode.
I think of voodoo in the bottoms of soup-cans,
and I want to tell the poet that the blues
is not my name, that Alabama
is something I cannot use
in my business.
He is so like my father,
I don't ask the Famous Black Poet,
afterwards,
to remove his shoes,
knowing the inexplicable black
and pink I will find there, a cut
gone wrong in five places.
I don't ask him to remove
his pants, since that too
is known, what has never known
a blade, all the spaces between,
where we differ . . .
I have spent years tugging
between my legs,
and proved nothing, really.
I wake to the sheets I kicked aside,
and examine where they've failed to mend
their own creases, resembling some silken
obstruction, something pulled
from my father's chest, a bad heart,
a lung,
the lung of the Famous Black Poet
saying nothing I want to understand.

Perhaps,
in the exaggerated grace
of his weight
settling,
the wings
raised, held in
strike-or-embrace
position,
I recognized
something more
than swan, I can't say.
There was just
this barely defined
shoulder, whose feathers
came away in my hands,
and the bit of world
left beyond it, coming down
to the heat-crippled field,
ravens the precise color of
sorrow in good light, neither
black nor blue, like fallen
stitches upon it,
and the hour forever,
it seemed, half-stepping
its way elsewhere--
then
everything, I
remember, began
happening more quickly.

So that each
is its own, now—each has fallen, blond stillness.
Closer, above them,
the damselflies pass as they would over water,
if the fruit were water,
or as bees would, if they weren't
somewhere else, had the fruit found
already a point more steep
in rot, as soon it must, if
none shall lift it from the grass whose damp only
softens further those parts where flesh
goes soft.
There are those
whom no amount of patience looks likely
to improve ever, I always said, meaning
gift is random,
assigned here,
here withheld—almost always
correctly
as it's turned out: how your hands clear
easily the wreckage;
how you stand—like a building for a time condemned,
then deemed historic. Yes. You
will be saved.